Thought fragments

Mindscapes was an exhibit of large scale art works on canvas, and site-specific installation pieces. This exhibit took place at the Beverly Art Center in Chicago, from February 11 through March 20, 2011. Four of the large scale art works have remained at the Center as permanent displays.

As part of this exhibit, a site-specific installation piece Thought Fragments was displayed. This sequence consists of 4 wall mounted pieces, each 8 x 9 feet in size. Over 1,000 fragments of thoughts, fragments of my own previous art works, were used. The fragments are very irregular in size and shape, approximately 4 x 5 inches on average. They were made by dry mounting previous art works on canvas, onto matting board, and then cutting them to various sizes.

The colors of Thought Fragments include the primary colors (red, blue and yellow) and the secondary colors (orange, purple and green). Most of the pieces also include fragments of words.

The distribution of the fragments corresponded to cosmic patterns. Edwin Hubble (a University of Chicago alumnus, class of 1910) pioneered the study of galaxies. He defined the four basic types—elliptical, spiral, barred spiral, and irregular. Each of the four Thought Fragments installations corresponds to one of these galactic types. He also discovered that the universe is expanding, and that there was a big bang.

The Thought Fragments series is my first artistic attempt at bridging our own consciousness to that of galactic-scale existence. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that in our own central nervous system, we have 100 billion neurons, that in our Milky Way galaxy there are 100 billion stars, and with Hubble Space Telescope results, there are 100 billion galaxies.

During the opening of the Mindscapes exhibit, people were invited to take pieces of the installation “Piece of My Mind” as a gift. By the end of the evening I become mindless.

You can watch this happen on the YouTube video which you can access through this website: